


Wheels Within Wheels

by darkpenn



Series: The Artificial Heart [3]
Category: Ghost in the Shell
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:36:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkpenn/pseuds/darkpenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A trail of clues seems to add up to nothing, but danger is just around the corner for the Major.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wheels Within Wheels

[This story takes place within the Stand Alone Complex period, and follows the story Friends and Enemies, which in turn follows the story With Enough Parts … .]

 

“An interesting report,” said Aramaki. “So you think the Americans are contemplating some sort of move against the Alliance Francaise?”  
“My impression is that they would like to, but they would need a politically acceptable reason and some level of international support,” said the Major. “Batou, did you learn anything further from the contacts you … established?”  
“I have nothing to add to our official report,” said Batou. Bitch, he said on their internal link.  
The Major laughed out loud.  
“Something humourous?” said Aramaki.  
“I will need to claim expenses for an evening gown,” said the Major. “And Batou for a tuxedo.”  
“I don’t think clothing of that type is classed as relevant to combat duties, so it would fall outside departmental policy,” said Aramaki. “But I’ll think about it. In the meantime, I believe we should turn our attention to Toru Shigata. You are probably not aware of it, but there is evidence that he arrived in Japan a few days ago. Security cameras at the airport picked up his image and eventually matched it to an old file photo, but as he was travelling under a Vietnamese passport and there are no warrants for him, there was no immediate connection made. We assume he is still somewhere in this country, whereabouts unknown.”  
“Any mention of him in the chatter of the groups we monitor?” said Batou.  
“Nothing so far.”  
“Maybe we should try something a bit more old-fashioned,” said the Major. “Maybe I should pay a visit to someone who moves in the same sort of circle as Shigata. A few years ago I ran across a small-time black-tech dealer called Julius Case. Operates in Chiba. He doesn’t handle anything particularly big or dangerous but he’s the sort who hears a lot of things. It’s possible he would know something if Shigata was back in town for something other than the sushi.”  
“Go ahead,” said Aramaki. “Batou, do a rundown on Shigata’s Vietnamese passport. If it’s a fake it might lead us somewhere.”  
The Major and Batou left Aramaki’s office.  
“Oh, very funny,” said Batou. “Any possibility you could have your sense of humour deleted in your next maintenance?”  
“Not a chance,” said the Major.  
Batou sighed. “I liked you better before you discovered sex,” he said.  
The Major began to walk away. “No, you don’t,” she said over her shoulder.  
Batou smiled. “No, I don’t,” he said to himself.

 

The Major entered the dark little bar in Chiba and looked around.  
A woman in a transparent plastic outfit came up to her, blocking her way. “Fuck off,” she said. “This is my territory. Official permit, exclusive rights, everything.”  
“I’m just looking for someone,” said the Major. She flicked her jacket open so that the woman, but no-one else in the bar, could see her insignia.  
“You’re not like any cop I’ve seen,” said the woman.  
“Then maybe you haven’t seen enough,” said the Major. “I’m looking for Julius Case. Tell me where he is and you can get back to doing what you do. Or we can stand here until your customers decide they might like to try something new, and screw your exclusive rights.”  
The woman took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a plume of pink smoke at the Major, who paid no attention to it. “He’s got a room in the back, sort of his office,” she said finally. “Now fuck off. And welcome to Chiba.”  
Julius Case was playing solitaire on an ancient computer when the Major walked in.  
“Remember me?” she said.  
“How could I forget?” he said, as she sat down on the edge of the desk, leaning over him. “The major Major, the ghost with the most, the girl with the heart of marble and ass to match.”  
“Ah, so you do remember.”  
“I remember that you persuaded me to provide some information on some former customers of mine. Who ended up dead.”  
“As I recall, you didn’t like them in the first place, and I made sure that you got your money before we moved on them. Ten on the jack.”  
“Yeah, well, that’s true. You know, I think that’s the only time I ever got paid by a terrorist group. That’s why I don’t work with them now. Politicos always think they should ride for free. I only provide logistical support now. And I only sell to honest criminals, no politics involved.”  
“I know, but I thought you might know someone in your line of work. Toru Shigata. Nine Zeroes. Just back from an extended holiday.”  
Case looked at her closely. “Toru Shigata,” he repeated. “I might have something for you. What’s it worth?”  
The Major mentioned a monetary figure.  
Case continued to study her. “Not really what I’m interested in,” he said. He reached up and touched her on the lips. “Make me an offer.”  
The Major let Case rub his finger across her mouth for a few moments. She thought: Been a while …   
Then she sighed, and drew her gun. She pressed it against his forehead.  
“How about this for a deal?” she said. “You tell me, and I don’t splatter your brains across the room.”  
Case smiled. “Hmm, let me think … no. No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Go ahead, if that’s what you want to do.”  
She took the gun away from his head and pressed it against his crotch. “How about here?” she said. “Make an awful mess, and you’ll take a long time to die.”  
He continued to smile but now it was a bit forced. “You sure know how to turn a man on, Major,” he said. “But I guess I’ll take the money.”  
“Wise choice,” she said. She took a roll of bills from her jacket pocket and put it on the desk. “Now: Shigata.”  
Case shrugged and put the money into his pocket. “Yeah, I got a call from him a week ago, saying that he was coming back to Japan. He wanted me to help him with some shipping, didn’t say what, just checking that I was available. Funny, I thought he’d given up the business. He’s got a wife and kids in Saigon, apparently, and that sort of thing makes you want to get into a safer profession. Or so I’m told.”  
“Do you know where he was calling from?” said the Major.  
Case smiled again. “Turns out that I do. Somewhere in Osaka, according to my caller trace. I use it on every call. Illegal, sure, but what the hell. Doesn’t mean he’s still there, of course. But I can give you the number.” He took out his phone and punched buttons on it. Then he wrote some details on a piece of paper and handed it to her.   
“You know,” said the Major, “if I find you’re lying to me, I’ll come back and put that bullet in your crotch.”  
Case laughed. “Yes, I think you would,” he said. “What do I get if I’m telling the truth?”  
The Major considered. “Then maybe I’ll come back and fuck you till you wish I’d shot you,” she said. She got up to leave.  
Case laughed again. “Anytime, Major,” he said.

 

Batou and the Major sat in the car and watched Shigata from a distance, after locating him through the number from Case. He was walking slowly around a little park – waiting, obviously.  
“Looks like your friend came through on the number,” said Batou.  
“I suppose that means I have to go back to Chiba and have sex with him,” said the Major.  
Batou was silent for a few seconds. Then he said: “I think I need to get my ears checked. I could have sworn you said – ”  
“Shigata’s getting a call,” said the Major. “Run the trace.”  
Shigata answered his phone and spoke briefly. Then he returned the phone to his pocket and left the park.  
“Damn, too short for a track, and he’s using a scrambler,” said Batou, looking up from the telco equipment. “But definitely very local.”  
“I’ll tail him, you bring the car,” said the Major, getting out.  
Shigata walked through the streets of Osaka for twenty minutes, before entering a rundown noodle restaurant. He sat down with another man, who took a briefcase off the table and set it on the floor when Shigata sat down.  
After a decent interval, the Major entered and took a table on the far side of the restaurant. She noted the surveillance camera in the corner.  
She activated her link with Batou. “Can you get a feed from that camera?” she said.  
“Should be able to,” he said. “I’m parked just across the road. Hooking in … okay, I’ve got it. I see him. And I’m running the image of the other guy. Right, got him. Jacque L’Cul, minor functionary at the French trade commission in Tokyo. Got any idea what they’re talking about?”  
“No, they’re being careful. But I’m guessing it’s not the noodles. By the way, did anything turn up on Shigata’s passport?”  
“Turned out to be genuine. Which means he’s a citizen of Vietnam, which means we can’t just pick him up and squeeze him.”  
“For the moment, then, we follow and observe.”  
The Major’s phone rang, and she flipped it open. It was a text message from Case: I have something for you.  
She sent a message back: What will it cost?  
What you want to pay.  
She closed the phone.  
“What’s that about?” said Batou.  
“A date,” she said, as she watched the two men get up to leave.

 

“Had enough yet?” said the Major.  
Case gave a groan.  
The Major got off him and off the desk. She began to collect her clothes and pull them back on.  
“Well, that was certainly better than being shot,” said Case, sitting up and rubbing his bruises.  
“Now,” said the Major. “Don’t you have something to tell me?”  
“No, that was just a lie to get into your – ”  
She pulled her gun out of its holster. “Did you know,” she said, “that I have a competition with my colleagues in Section Nine about who can kill the most people in a year? I’m winning, with 26. Care to make it 27?”  
“You wouldn’t shoot me, not after what we just did.”  
“Well, I wouldn’t have shot you before it, would I?”  
Case sighed. “Just can’t trust a woman,” he said. “Okay, here it is.” He got up and dressed, and then took a single page of paper out of the drawer. He handed it to her.  
“A shipping order?” said the Major. She looked at the signature at the bottom. Shigata.  
“Odd collection of stuff,” he said. “Mostly past-gen military, nothing that’s very hard to get, really. But it doesn’t seem to add up to anything. The odd thing is that he wants it moved in a Sec-1A Class container suitable for air transport. With official papers, which means fake ones, which is where I come in. That’s a very tough, very expensive package.”  
“Have you given it to him?”  
“Sure, it’s my business. I sent it to him a couple of hours ago.”  
The Major nodded. She studied the list of components. “You couldn’t even make a decent bicycle out of this stuff,” she said finally.  
Her phone beeped; she had shut off her link while she had been ‘negotiating’ with Case. A message from Batou: Come immediately.  
“Thanks,” she said to Case, putting the paper into her pocket. She was at the door when she stopped. Then she turned and came back. She took hold of Case by his shirtfront, pulled him to her, and kissed him passionately. “Thanks for everything,” she said. Then she was gone.  
Case looked at the closing door. “Anytime,” he said. 

 

“Jacque L’Cul,” said Batou. “Now deceased, obviously.”  
“Two bullets, in the head, close range, from the front,” said the Major. “So probably someone he knew. Shigata?”  
“No, we’ve had him under surveillance.”  
“Where is his briefcase?” said the Major.  
“What briefcase?”  
“The briefcase he had at the restaurant when he met Shigata.”  
Batou looked around at the shabby, empty room where L’Cul’s body had been discovered a few hours before. “Not here,” he said.  
The Major turned the body over. There were exit wounds in the back of the skull. She went over to the far side of the room. After a few seconds, she found the bullets and prised them out of the wall. She showed them to Batou.  
“Can you identify these?” she said.  
Batou inspected the battered lumps of metal closely.  
“Hmm,” he said. “Hard to say. But I think … yeah, I know these. From a Klyder 9.5mm. One of the weapons favoured by our American friends. You think maybe L’Cul had a deal going with them, and then he stopped being useful?”  
“Sounds likely,” said the Major. “And if he passed something to Shigata in that briefcase, it’s likely that it was something the Americans wanted him to do.”  
The Major flipped open her phone and called Ishikawa.  
“What did Jacque L’Cul do at the French trade commission?” she said.  
Ishikawa searched the database. “Mainly, he handled components for French-built nuclear reactors,” he said. “His main job was collecting and sending used parts back to France for treatment, as far as I can tell. Sometimes parts like that can pick up a bit of radioactivity. Nothing dangerous, though. And he didn’t handle any actual nuclear material.”  
“But even low-level components are marked with serial numbers from the manufacturer, right?”  
“Yes, it’s part of the international agreement on nuclear reactor technology. So everything can be tracked to the country of origin.”  
“Can you tell where components handled by L’Cul were manufactured?”  
Ishikawa was silent for a few seconds while he searched. Then he said: “There’s a government-owned company in Montreal that makes quite a lot of this stuff. That mean anything to you?”  
“Maybe,” said the Major. She closed the phone, and took the shipping order from Case from her pocket and handed it to Batou. “If you put some Quebec-made components with trace radioactivity together with this stuff and put it in a shipping crate with a high level of security, what do you get?” she said.  
Batou studied the list.  
“Well, not a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said at last. “Not even close. Where is the crate going, anyway?”  
“Hmm,” said the Major. “Let’s find out.”   
She dived into the records of the Office of Secure Transport at the New Tokyo airport.  
After a few moments, she was back.  
“Let’s go,” she said to Batou. “Now.”  
“Back to the office?” said Batou, as they ran out of the building.  
“No, to the closest military airport. We have to catch a plane.”

 

“I don’t get it,” said Batou, as the jet, a mid-sized bomber, left the runway. They were seated in the empty hold.  
“Thirty minutes ago, a transport plane took off, headed for Seattle,” she said. “It has a secure crate on board. And someone who fits Shigata’s description, accompanied by some made-in-US heavies. He must have shaken the tail.”  
“But even secure crates are inspected,” said Batou.  
“Yes, and all the inspectors found was a collection of old military components, casings and circuits and the like,” she said. “If they had looked closely, they might have found some reactor components with French markings and trace radioactivity, but it wouldn’t have meant anything to them.”  
“So there’s a heavy-duty crate of components on the way to Seattle,” said Batou. “So what?”  
“So if the plane crashes – just say that it has a collision with a surface-to-air missile – the components could be recovered. It could easily be made to look like the remains of a bomb with French fingerprints, put together with the help of a French diplomat and a Japanese terrorist on the French payroll, on its way to a major American city. And then the Americans would have a plausible reason to act against the Alliance Francaise.”  
“And of course they wouldn’t trust Shigata, who has connections with the Nine Zeroes and the Sunflowers, with anything like a real bomb. But a fake one? Yeah, they could live with that. But why would Shigata play along? Money?”  
The Major shrugged.  
“Looks like your man Case turned out to be pretty useful,” said Batou.  
“Guess that means I have to give him a blow job next time,” said the Major.  
Batou stared at her. He said: “Hey, did you just say – ”   
The radio speaker connected to the cockpit beeped.  
“Target just ahead,” said the pilot. “No response from them on telco. And we are over international waters. Something else, Major. There’s an American surface ship on long-range radar. I would guess that we will be in missile range in about fifteen minutes. American coast in forty minutes.”  
“Now what?” said Batou. “Do we shoot them down?”  
“No, the Americans would simply recover the wreckage, which is their plan in the first place,” said the Major. “We need to get aboard and take the plane back to New Tokyo.” She pushed the intercom button to speak to the pilot. “Get in front and above them,” she said.   
“They’ll have protection on board,” Batou said. “Not that those guys would know that they’re on a one-way ride. So how are we going to manage this?”  
“We are not,” she said. “I am.”  
She snapped open her safety harness, stood up, and removed the Emergency Exit panel from the side of the plane. Instantly, there was a hurricane wind. She looked out, at the transport plane some distance below them  
“Oh no,” shouted Batou. “Don’t tell me that you’re going to … ”  
“Alright,” shouted the Major, handing the panel to Batou. “I won’t tell you.”  
Then she was gone, leaping into space.  
“Damn,” muttered Batou, as he pushed the panel back into position. “Wish she wouldn’t do things like that.”

 

She was falling, turning her body to guide her descent towards the transport plane. If she missed, it was a long way to the glittering sea below. And even if she survived the impact, her artificial body would sink like the piece of metal it was.  
But she didn’t miss. She landed squarely on the roof of the plane and grabbed hold of an antenna to steady herself.  
Battling the ferocious slipstream, she punched down through the aluminium skin of the plane. It was tougher than she expected, and it took her several minutes to make a hole large enough to get through, pushing aside wires and cables and tearing through several layers of metal.   
She swung herself into the body of the plane, gun drawn. Her unconventional entry must have caused some damage; alarms were beeping and lights were flashing. She was in a little compartment. She pushed open the door leading to the main cabin.  
There were three American agents at the other end, with Shigata handcuffed to a seat at the back. The agents saw her immediately and turned towards her, drawing their guns. She ran at them along the narrow corridor, flipping into a somersault as she did so. One agent went down to a savage kick to the head, another to a series of punches. The third got a shot off, the bullet slamming into her shoulder. She shot him at a range so close she felt his last breath on her face.  
She turned to Shigata.  
“You don’t understand!” he shouted, trying to get up. “They have my family! In Saigon! They will kill them! There are American agents there!”  
“I see,” said the Major. “I’ll take care of it.”  
Shigata sagged back into the chair.  
The Major headed for the pilot compartment. She checked her internal clock. One minute to missile range. Should be enough.

 

“Not always easy to tell,” said Aramaki, after listening to Batou’s report, “whose side we are on.”  
“Our own, I suppose,” said Batou. “I don’t much care what the Americans and the French do to each other, just so long as they don’t pick our turf as the place to arrange it.”  
“Our information, now we have had the chance to put it all together, is that they had had L’Cul on their payroll for a while, and they saw a way to link him and Shigata together,” said Aramaki. “But of course they couldn’t leave L’Cul around to complicate their story of an unsuccessful nuclear attack on a major US city. When you pay someone to betray their country, it means they will probably betray you for more money, eventually.”  
“And Shigata?”  
“Someone who was a credible link to organised terrorism, and who could be manipulated. That’s the trouble with trying to settle down and get out of the business. You can’t.” He sighed. “And where is the Major?” he said. “Having her shoulder repaired?”  
“Yes, but she also said that her heart was telling her that she had to do something. A promise to keep, she said. Don’t really know what she meant by that.”

 

The agent fanned himself in the energy-sapping Saigon humidity. He could hear the television from the other room, where his colleague sat with the Vietnamese woman and the two children.  
He took out his phone and checked it. The message was late, but not worryingly so. It should be coming through any time now. Then they could do their job and get out of this fetid, stinking country.   
The noise of the television suddenly stopped. Silence.  
He stood up, drawing his gun. He went to the door leading to the other room and opened it.  
At first, he thought the shimmer was a trick of the hot, still air.  
Then it reached for him.

 

Julius Case heard the door of his office open, and turned towards it.   
She was standing there. He smiled.  
“Hi,” she said.

 

END


End file.
